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Baxter

Let's start this series with something that illustrates a spectacular shift of automation in manufacturing, Let's look at a fire-engine red robot poised to transform how humans interact with, and work alongside robots.

If you talk to Rodney Brooks, CEO, Rethink Robotics, he'll tell you that using a search engine is a different experience than talking to a person, but both experiences have their strengths and their place in our lives.

"Over the next twenty years no one is going to mistake a robot for a person, but nevertheless, we will interact and collaborate with robots and they will become as common place in our lives as turning to a search engine is today," said Brooks.

And today, Rethink Robotics, who recently raised $30 million in a Series C round, showed the world Baxter, a robot built for the modern manufacturing environment and to help US manufacturing compete with off shore low cost labor. They call it adaptive manufacturing - think of Baxter as a ready-to-wear robot for any manufacturing environment.

Rethink focused on the simplicity of integrating Baxter into a manufacturing environment so a company doesn't have to reconfigure their manufacturing lines. But, Baxter is also a complete system that can be unpackaged and working in less than an hour and be trained by non technical personnel. Employees can train Baxter to do a new task just by showing him what to do -- no software programming needed. So now, humans get to supervise robots instead of doing mundane tasks, people working alongside robots.

And, to prove that a rising tide floats all boats, Baxter uses Willow Garage's open source Robot Operating System (ROS) as the nerve center for his autonomous behavior.

But Rethink also took a more eCommerce, internet approach to the acquisition of Baxter letting customers easily contact, get a quote or order via their website. Essentially, you can just order Baxter online like you would anything else.

"Robots will become cheaper and more adaptive to their surroundings. No one will find it surprising they can train a robot to do a new task for them in just a few minutes," added Brooks. "The robots will understand the tasks in terms of the objects, places, and people that define the task rather than as a series of simple motions, so they will exhibit simple forms of 'common sense' -- e.g., if a robot has been trained to put a dishes in a dishwasher, but a person comes up to it and takes the dish out of its hands it will understand that there is no need to continue heading to the dishwasher, but instead go back to the dining table for the next dish."

According to Brooks, in the short term the first places we will see this next generation of intelligent, collaborative and trainable robot like Baxter, is on production lines where robots will be used by factory floor workers to do the truly dull and repetitive jobs, freeing up those workers to do tasks that require more dexterity and judgment.

"As a result American manufacturers and American workers will be more competitive on the global stage," states Brooks.